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The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900: The Ars Combinatoria of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2020

Julie M. Johnson*
Affiliation:
Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio

Abstract

This article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Dicker married Pavel Brandeis in 1936; this essay follows the convention of using her single name until that date.

2 Uhl, Heidemarie, “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and the Ambivalence of Modernism,” in Klimt's Women, ed. Natter, Tobias (Vienna, 2000), 1417Google Scholar.

3 The term “Bauhaus methods” has become shorthand for Johannes Itten's preliminary course, a phrase that Rainer Wick finds inadequate for describing the varied teaching approaches at the institution, but one that is nonetheless a “linguistic necessity.” Yet the phrase is apt here: in Wick's own words, while she was at Terezín, Dicker-Brandeis “applied virtually the entire pedagogical program of her teacher of many years, Johannes Itten: from the elementary geometrical exercises in form to the rhythm exercises, nature studies and still lifes, and the color studies and collage pictorial analyses of Cranach, Titian, Vermeer, Cézanne, van Gogh, Matisse, and others.” , Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004), 1112, 314Google Scholar.

4 Willy Groag, June 1990, Commentaries on Friedl's letter “History of Terezín Drawings,” Archives of Elena Makarova, as cited in Makarova, , ed., From Bauhaus to Terezín: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Her Pupils (Jerusalem, 1990), 24Google Scholar. See also Heuberger, Georg, ed., Vom Bauhaus nach Terezín: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis und die Kinderzeichnungen aus dem Ghetto-Lager Theresienstadt (Frankfurt, 1991)Google Scholar.

5 Early attention came in a 1970 exhibition at the Bauhaus Archive, Darmstadt, and in 1988 at the Jewish Museum, Prague and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Collection and Archive. The standard, most comprehensive work is by Makarova, Elena, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis Vienna 1898–Auschwitz 1944 (Los Angeles, 2001)Google Scholar, a variant of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre (Vienna, 1999), an exhibition that also travelled to Graz, Cesky Krumlov, and Paris. For more recent attention see Katharina Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?: Möbeldesign, Innenraumgestaltung, und Architektur der Wiener Ateliergemeinschaft von Friedl Dicker und Franz Singer” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2018); Otto, Elizabeth, “Passages with Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: From the Bauhaus through Theresienstadt,” in Passages of Exile, eds. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich, 2017), 230–51Google Scholar; Zwiauer, Charlotte, “Aufbruch der Geschlechter zwischen Moderne und Antimoderne: Die Künstlerin und Kunstpädagogin Friedl Dicker (1898–1944),” in Die Revolutionierung des Alltags: Zur intellektuellen Kultur von Frauen im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit, eds. Doris Ingrisch, Ilse Korotin, and Charlotte Zwiauer (Frankfurt, 2004), 225–42Google Scholar. In addition to being included in several books on women artists and designers of late, Dicker-Brandeis's work appears more often in thematic group exhibitions, for example: Schwarz, Werner Michael, Spitaler, Georg, and Wikidal, Elke, eds., Red Vienna 1919–1934: Ideas, Debates, Practices (Vienna: Wien Museum, 2019)Google Scholar; Fellner, Sabine and Rollig, Stella, eds., City of Women (Vienna: Belvedere, 2019)Google Scholar; Peters, Olaf, ed., Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s (New York: Neue Galerie, 2018)Google Scholar; Klee, Alexander and Rollig, Stella, eds., Beyond Klimt: New Horizons in Central Europe (Vienna: Belvedere, 2018)Google Scholar; Winklbauer, Andrea and Fellner, Sabine, eds., The Better Half—Jewish Women Artists before 1938 (Vienna: Jewish Museum, 2016)Google Scholar; Husslein-Arco, Agnes, Köhler, Thomas, Burmeister, Ralf, Klee, Alexander, and Lütgens, Annelie, eds., Vienna-Berlin: The Art of Two Cities (Vienna: Belvedere, 2014)Google Scholar.

6 Greenberg, Clement, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O'Brian, John (Chicago, 1986), 4:8593Google Scholar.

7 Wagner was also interested in purity of medium: his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk did not mean a mellifluous blending of the arts, but a strengthening of each one as they came together. Koss, Juliet, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis, 2010), xiiGoogle Scholar. For other seminal critiques of the Greenbergian paradigm see Anger, Jenny, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar and Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme (Minneapolis, 2018).

8 To “disrupt one discipline with the etiquette of another” is a hallmark of interdisciplinarity. Koss, Juliet, “Invisible Wagner,” in The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, eds. Finger, Anke and Follett, Danielle (Baltimore, 2011), 193Google Scholar.

9 See for example, Fer, Briony, Batchelor, David, and Wood, Paul, eds., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars (New Haven, 1993)Google Scholar, an Open University textbook that covers competing avant-gardes and political rhetoric in various European art centers. Jettisoning formalism, the authors examine how avant-garde art could take so many different visual forms while still making claims to representing the “real”: from the Neoplatonism of Mondrian's total abstraction, to the distortions of New Objectivity, to the various techniques of the Surrealists. Such competing definitions of the “real” depend on notions of where reality lies: Is it in the unconscious, the sociopolitical, or the invisible ether of ideal forms? These rhetorical positions in turn link to political responses to the war: the universalizing reconstructionist impulses of more utopianist groups versus the political critiques of groups who wanted to dismantle contemporary power structures.

10 Otto, “Passages,” 231.

11 This model lingers in surveys of modern art. For a humorous critique of such modernist narratives of originality and individual discovery, see Krauss, Rosalind, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

12 Brook, Timothy, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York, 2008), 22Google Scholar.

13 Csáky, Moritz, “Hybride Kommunikationsräume und Mehrfachidentitäten. Zentraleuropa und Wien um 1900,” in Migration und Innovation um 1900: Perspektiven auf das Wien der Jahrhundertwende, eds. Röhrlich, Elisabeth and Meisinger, Agners (Vienna, 2016), 6598CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Schorske's model does us a great service in highlighting the gendered nature of the father-son rebellion: this is indeed how the Secession self-narrated, for example. Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. Beller's model is in theory not exclusive of women, and the number of women who were prominent artists who were Jewish would in fact support his model of creativity. Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

14 For Broncia Koller (1863–1934), Helene Funke (1869–1957), Ilse Conrat (1880–1942), and Helene von Taussig (1879–1942), this was another path to an elite education. Koller studied in Munich; Funke, a German, went to Paris and interpreted Matisse and the Fauves before moving to Vienna; von Taussig went to Paris and Switzerland to study with Cuno Amiet, while Conrat traveled to Belgium to study sculpture.

15 Otto, in “Passages” has written beautifully about movement, migration and Dicker-Brandeis's life between the Bauhaus and Terezín, tracing the passages of her life as well as her afterlife in her students, two of whom became pioneers in the field of art therapy.

16 See for example, Klee and Rollig, Beyond Klimt, which remaps the interwar years to be more inclusive of artists from the former monarchy using the network paradigm.

17 Unless otherwise noted, biographical details in this article are based on , Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis Vienna 1898–Auschwitz 1944 (Los Angeles, 2001)Google Scholar and cross-checked with , Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Vienne 1898–Auschwitz 1944 (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar and , Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Ein Leben fur Kunst und Lehre (Vienna, 1999)Google Scholar.

18 Her father remarried in 1904. They lived at Hahngasse 30 until 1909 and then Bleichergasse 31, both in the ninth. Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 26.

19 Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 10.

20 Cizek, who published a book on the topic in 1912, Papier-Schneide- und Klebearbeiten, is considered the earliest pedagogue to employ paper cutting and stencils. Cizek's crucial role in Vienna's visual art scene has now been established by scholars in Vienna, chief among them Laven, Rolf, Franz Cizek und die Wiener Jugendkunst (Vienna, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 Gisela Jäger-Stein, “Jugenderinnerungen,” as cited in Ljuba Berankova and Ursula Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: vom Bauhaus nach Terezín,” in Heuberger, Vom Bauhaus nach Terezín, 63. Natalie Zemon Davis demonstrates how marginality can become an asset in Women on the Margins (Boston, 1997). Expressionist Helene von Taussig presents an extreme example of the restrictions that financially privileged women could experience. One of several daughters of the wealthy family of Theodor von Taussig, who had earned the gratitude of the emperor for salvaging the economy in 1873, she was not allowed to attend art school while she watched her friends enjoy this new freedom. After her father died in 1909, she embarked on a life of becoming an artist, going on study trips and studying privately in Switzerland and Paris. By then she was thirty. Johnson, Julie M., The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 (West Lafayette, 2012), 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Schoenberg offered the Composition Seminar at the Eugenie Schwarzwald School at Wallnerstrasse 9, which allowed “professional musicians, dilettantes, friends of art, beginners and advanced, to enroll as auditors or students” according to a 1918 informational poster at the Schoenberg Center, Vienna. Dicker enrolled in “Harmonielehre I” and “Analyse” according to Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 35.

23 Walter Gropius, “Address to the Students of the Staatliche Bauhaus, Held on the Occasion of the Yearly Exhibition of Student Work in July 1919,” as cited in Wingler, Hans M., The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, trans. Jabs, W. and Gilbert, B. (Cambridge, 1969), 36Google Scholar.

24 Alma Mahler played a role in this turn of events. Itten had attended a party at her house (she was married to Gropius at the time), and it was she who proposed that Gropius interview Itten to develop and teach the preliminary course at the Bauhaus. The number of Viennese students was underreported by Itten and has been recently revised by Wick, , “The Vienna School of Applied Arts, Johannes Itten and Franz Cizek,” in Viennese Kineticism. Modernism in Motion, eds. Bast, Gerald, Husslein-Arco, Agnes, Krejci, Harald, and Werkner, Patrick (Vienna, 2011), 21Google Scholar; and Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 44–45.

25 “Programme of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar” (1919) as cited in Kallir, Jane, Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstatte (New York, 1986), 22Google Scholar.

26 For a recent correction, see Éva Bajkay, “To the Bauhaus!” in Klee and Rollig, Beyond Klimt, 174–82.

27 Franciscono, Marcel, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years (Urbana, 1971), 180, 190Google Scholar.

28 Wick, Rainer K., “Die Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule und die Wiener Werkstatte: ein Bauhaus vor dem Bauhaus?,” in Bauhaus: Kunst und Pädagogik (Oberhausen, 2009), 5674Google Scholar.

29 Cizek exhibited student work as “Kinetismus” or Kineticism. For more on the role of dance, gesture and movement see Krejci, Harald, “Kineticism and Dance—The Choreography of Interconnectedness,” in Viennese Kineticism: Modernism in Motion, eds. Bast, Gerald, Husslein-Arco, Agnes, Krejci, Harald, and Werner, Patrick (Vienna, 2011), 180–83Google Scholar. See also Alexander, Zeynep Çelik, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Wick, “The Vienna School of Applied Arts, Johannes Itten and Franz Cizek,” 22.

31 Laven, Franz Cizek, 251. Itten took “one of the older girls” in his class to Weimar to give her “more appropriate support than he believed Cizek had to offer.” Hofmann, Ludwig, “Franz Cizek und seine Jugendkunstklasse,” Bildnerische Erziehung 2 (1969): 62Google Scholar, as cited in Wick, “The Vienna School of Applied Arts,” 21. Wick identifies that student as Dicker.

32 Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 14. She also designed and lithographed invitations for evenings starring Helge Lindberg and Emmy Heim. Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 61. Nicholas Fox Weber has written a lively history that captures some of these ephemeral events, retrieved in part through interviews with Annie Albers in The Bauhaus Group (New York, 2009).

33 “Du erlebst das Kunstwerk, es wird in Dir wiedergeboren.” Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 61. Parallels between Schoenberg's and Itten's pedagogies go beyond the scope of this article.

34 Edith Kramer, as cited in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 233.

35 Baumhoff, Anja, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic's Premier Art Institute, 1919–1932 (Frankfurt, 2001)Google Scholar and “Die ‘moderne Frau’ und ihre Stellung in der Bauhaus-Avantgarde,” in Die Neue Frau: Herausforderung fur die Bildmedien der Zwanziger Jahre, eds. Katharina Sykora, Annette Dorgerloh, Doris Noell-Rumpeltes, and Ada Raev (Marburg, 1993), 83–94.

36 Volker Wahl and Ute Ackermann, eds., Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar, 1919–1925, 7 Feb. 1921, 119, as cited in Otto, “Passages,” 232; Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 58, 62.

37 Letter from Walter Gropius, 19 Apr. 1931, Bauhaus Archives, Darmstadt, as cited in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 19.

38 Baumhoff, , “‘Ich spalte den Menschen’, Geschlechterkonzeptionen bei Johannes Itten,” in Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten, eds. Bothe, Rolf, Hahn, Peter and von Tavel, Hans Christoph (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1994), 9199Google Scholar; Zwiauer, “Aufbruch der Geschlechter,” 226.

39 Otto, Elizabeth and Rössler, Patrick, Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (London, 2019), 10Google Scholar.

40 Itten taught (as form master) sculpture until 1922 (in 1921/22 together with Schlemmer), metalworking until 1923 (alternating with Schlemmer in 1921/22), glass painting until 1922, woodworking (Tischlerei) until 1923, and weaving until 1921. Rainer K. Wick, “Johannes Itten und das frühe Bauhaus,” in Heuberger, Vom Bauhaus nach Terezín, 31.

41 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, ca. 1503, oil on wood, 66 × 44 in., Louvre.

42 Hildebrandt, Hans, Die Frau als Künstlerin (Berlin, 1928), 144Google Scholar, as translated by Otto, “Passages,” 235.

43 Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 20.

44 Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 65. Dicker made the poster for Heim's 1921 Bauhaus concert. Until recently, scholars assumed that Singer met Heim at the Bauhaus, but Itten wrote Heim on 29 Dec. 1917, sending greetings to her and Franz Singer, and in an undated postcard invites the two to a concert by Helge Lindberg. Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 37.

45 Letter from Dicker to Wottitz, Weimar, ca. 1921, in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 52.

46 Otto and Rössler, Bauhaus Women, 13.

47 The work reappears as a sculpture on the landing of a stairwell in her 1932 sketch for the home of August and Hilda Hériot, reproduced in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 98.

48 For a brief overview of Klee's teaching activities, see https://www.bauhaus100.com/the-bauhaus/training/curriculum/classes-by-paul-klee/, accessed 8 Dec. 2019.

49 “Da bricht ein neuer Skandal los, Ittenschüler contra Germanen, der ausserordentlich heftig wurde. Die Sache ist die: Die geistvoll-jüdische Gruppe Singer-Adler ist zu üppig geworden und hat leider auch Itten ernstlich beeinflusst. Mit diesem Hebel wollen sie das ganze Bauhaus in die Hand bekommen. Da lehnten sich die Arier begreiflicher Weise auf…. Es ist mir klar, dass Leute wie Singer-Adler nicht ans Bauhaus gehören und mit der Zeit fort müssen, wenn Ruhe eintreten soll.” Letter from Gropius to Lily Hildebrandt, Dec. 1920, in Isaacs, Reginald R., Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1983), 251Google Scholar, as cited in Wick, “Johannes Itten,” 32. Hövelmann transcribes “üppig” as “utopig” (utopian) in “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 48.

50 Also in the group: Franz Singer, Margit Téry-Adler, Lilli Gräf, and Anny Wottitz. The letter: “Wir verweisen auf unsere Bekanntmachung vom Dezember v. J., womit wir politische Betätigung im Bauhaus verboten haben. Wir sehen uns veranlasst, Ihnen unsere Missbilligung darüber auszusprechen, dass Sie in den Räumen des Bauhauses politische Propagandaschilder gelegentlich der Beerdigung der in der Gegenrevolution gefallenen Arbeiter angefertigt haben.” As cited in Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 70.

51 “Ich suche die Einheit in der Verbindung, nicht in der Trennung dieser Lebensformen…. Das Bauhaus könnte zu einer Insel der Eigenbrötler werden, wenn es den Kontakt mit der Arbeit der übrigen Welt und ihrer Arbeitsart verlore.” As cited in Wick, “Johannes Itten,” 33.

52 Weber, The Bauhaus Group, 120.

53 Paul Klee, “The Play of Forces in the Bauhaus,” as cited in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 50.

54 Itten resigns as of the end of the Wintersemester 1922/23. Wick, “Johannes Itten,” 34.

55 Johannes Itten, 28 Apr. 1931, Bauhaus Archive; Walter Gropius, 29 Apr. 1931, Bauhaus Archive. Cited and translated in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 19.

56 Letter from Dicker to Martha Döberl, ca. 1925, with a discussion of a lost suitcase, an appointment, and other business matters that were hard to manage with such an itinerary: “On Sunday I received a telegram stating I should bring my materials to Hans Moller on the train. I have no idea what it is about. Was something discussed at the atelier?” As cited in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 92.

57 Photographs of configurations provided by the artists are in the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Collection and Archives. Metz & Co. had planned to manufacture it and had “finally” found a factory that could do it, according to a letter sent to Singer on 1 Apr. 1936. Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 228.

58 Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 70.

59 They created stage sets for plays by August Stramm, Henrik Ibsen, Robert Musil, Shakespeare and worked with Berthold Viertel's theater troupe and Berthold Brecht in the early 1920s. Eighteen costume sketches survived. Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 69.

60 Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 71 and 76.

61 Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 165–66.

62 Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 71; Plakolm-Forsthuber, Sabine, “Frauen als Pioniere auf dem Gebiet der Architektur,” in Zum jüdischen Erbe in der Wiener Architektur. Der Beitrag jüdischer ArchitektInnen am Wiener Baugeschehen 1868–1938, ed. Prokop, Ursula (Vienna, 2016), 202–3Google Scholar.

63 “Das Geheimnis dieser Arbeiten scheint aber darin zu liegen, dass alle diese Elemente zu einem originalen unteilbaren Ganzen verschmolzen sind . . . seine Rechtfertigung genauso im Sozialen, in der Armut wie im Luxus finden kann.” As cited in Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 72.

64 The Montessori kindergarten in the Goethehof, Vienna 22, Shüttaustrasse 1–39, 1930 was damaged in Feb. 1934 and later destroyed. It was illustrated in Österreichische Bau- u. Werkkunst 8 (1932): 65. A private commission with a glass cylinder staircase in front and long horizontal façade was the Guesthouse Auersperg-Hériot, Vienna 2, Rustenschacherallee, 1932–4 (destroyed). The Tennis Club Heller in Hietzing, 1928, was an avant-garde design. Plakolm-Forsthuber, “Frauen als Pioniere,” 203–4.

65 The album is featured in Schwarz, Spitaler, and Wikidal, eds., Das Rote Wien. See also Hövelmann, “Bauhaus in Wien?,” 226.

66 Plakolm-Forsthuber, “Frauen als Pioniere,” 203–6. Otto, “Passages,” 236n20 also mentions a similar dynamic in the Singer Archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum—Singer is often named, Dicker rarely, but some of the works are by her.

67 On the “call to order” see Silver, Kenneth, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London, 1989)Google Scholar and Batchelor, David, “‘This Liberty and This Order’: Art in France after the First World War,” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism, eds. Fer, Briony, Batchelor, David, and Wood, Paul (New Haven, 1993), 286Google Scholar. For an example of the disruptive attitude of “Tendenzkunst,” Otto Dix involved Kokoschka in his politics when he collaged Kokoschka's proclamation on the importance of preserving cultural heirlooms onto the gutter of his 1920 Match-seller I (a scene in which a bourgeois couple's dachshund pisses on a disabled war veteran). To paint mere self-expression, in this attitude, is to be complicit. Such a painting is part of the system of art that the bourgeois can comfortably purchase, as they would not in the case of Otto Dix's paintings of corrupt politicians and journalists. Paul Wood, “Realisms and Realities,” in Fer, Batchelor, and Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism, 250–333, 292–93.

68 This, in spite of the fact that one of the most entrenched Berlin Dadaists, Raoul Hausmann, came from Vienna. Ralf Burmeister, “Dada Berlin and Perhaps Austria's ‘Greatest Experimenter,’” in Husslein-Arco et al., Vienna-Berlin, 242.

69 For good full-page illustrations, see Peters, Before the Fall, plates 209–13 and Husslein-Arco et al., Vienna-Berlin, plates 273–78. The original posters are lost but reproductions are preserved at the Bildarchiv, mumok (museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien) and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Collection and Archives.

70 In 1942, Dicker-Brandeis wrote a postcard to her friend Hilde Kothny from the deportation point to Terezín, Gradetz Kalau: “My dear, all is going, contrary to the expectations, well. It is the usual story: some are selected for shearing, while others are ordered to shear. I turned out more courageous than I had supposed. I had thought my tear glands were on my shoulders, but learned—they are not there either.” Makarova, From Bauhaus to Terezín, 21.

71 “SO SIEHT ES AUS, MEIN KIND, DIESE WELT. DA WIRST DU HINEINGEBOREN. DA GIBT ES WELCHE ZUM SCHEEREN BESTELLT UND WELCHE DIE WERDEN GESCHOREN. SO SIEHT SIE AUS MEIN KIND, IN DER WELT IN UNSERN UND ANDERN LÄNDERN UND WENN DIR, MEIN KIND, DIESE WELT NICHT GEFÄLLT DANN MUST DU SIE EBEN ÄNDERN.” Angelika Romauch, “Friedl Dicker: Marxistische Fotomontagen 1932/33. Das Verfahren der Montage als sozial-kritische Methode” (MA thesis, University of Vienna, 2003).

72 Franz Singer testified on her behalf, claiming that she could not have fabricated the passports, because she “does not know how to draw a straight line.” Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 21.

73 Cornelia Cabuk, “‘Magical’ Objectivity in Vienna and Austria,” in Vienna-Berlin, 343–48, 344.

74 From Hronov, undated. For the longer quotation in German see Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 83.

75 Undated letter from Dicker-Brandeis to Hilde Kothny, Hronov, in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 26.

76 Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 79.

77 Wick, “Johannes Itten,” 13–16.

78 Laven, Rolf, “‘First Class’ Werke der Cizek'schen Jugendkunstklasse auf der Wiener Kunstschau 1908,” in Gustav Klimt und die Kunstschau 1908, eds. Husslein-Arco, Agnes and Weidinger, Alfred (Vienna, 2008), 7884Google Scholar. This is not to say that Itten learned about collage techniques in Vienna; he had studied with Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart from 1913, where he practiced creating abstract collages out of torn paper and fabric scraps. Wick, “Johannes Itten,” 16.

79 From the memoirs of Hilde Kothny, as quoted in Makarova, From Bauhaus to Terezín, 21.

80 Anna Sladkova, “Memoirs on Friedl Dicker.” Nachod, 1985, Archives of the Jewish Museum, Prague, as cited in Makarova, From Bauhaus to Terezín, 21.

81 Arcade Gallery, London, Aug. 1940. A copy of the title page is illustrated in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 26.

82 Hilde Kothny in interview series with Elena Makarova, Geneva, Moscow, Vienna, 1988–99, as cited in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 154.

83 As quoted and translated in Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 13. Dicker-Brandeis also used mathematical metaphors in her private letters to Hilde Kothny. For one example, see Berankova and Thürich, “Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,” 82.

84 Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 28.

85 “Friedl dyed sheets various colors. She had decided right away that they would be used in plays—a green one, thrown over a group of children, would be a forest.” Hilde Kothny, “Memoirs on Friedl Dicker,” Taranto 1986, Archives of the Jewish Museum of Prague, as cited in Makarova, From Bauhaus to Terezín, 5.

86 Helga Pollak Kinsky, personal communication with Linnie Wix, 6 Feb. 2006 as cited in , Wix, “Aesthetic Empathy in Teaching Art to Children: The Work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis in Terezin,” Art Therapy 26, no. 4 (2009): 154Google Scholar.

87 Drafted on 4 Mar. 1914 at age thirty-five, Klee, who was not stationed at the front, found a way to paint extensively, making 255 works in 1915. He wrote at the time: “One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one's activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible.” Klee, Felix, ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918 (Berkeley, 1964), 313Google Scholar.

88 Otto and Rössler, Bauhaus Women, 14.

89 She went on to become a high-ranking Soviet spy in London; the records are thought to be sealed in the KGB archives in Moscow. Otto and Rössler, Bauhaus Women, 133. Forbes, Duncan, ed., Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2013)Google Scholar.

90 Her memoirs have yet to be published or translated. Trude Waehner, “Una Cosa Sola,” typescript, n.d., Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (LIT).